Sneak Peak Sunday: Unsafe at Any Speed

Good afternoon!

This weekend is dedicated to my Elsie W. books, "Not While I'm Chewing" and "Unsafe at Any Speed."  Today I'm sharing an except from the second book, Unsafe at any Speed.   Remember, if you want any, or all of my nine books, you can find all of my titles, and links to where you can purchase them, either right here on this blog or by hitting My personal website.

Meanwhile, enjoy this slice from the middle the second Elsie W. book!

Chapter fourteen:

Elsie:  The Norma Rae of Stuff, Installed.

          

I don’t know if Elsie ever worked for a union. As far as I know, her work history involved working for WalMart  (fired)  working for Sam’s Club (Fired)  working as a telemarketer for an unnamed company  (fired) and for Monuments, Inc. (Business Closed.)  None of those businesses felt like a union gig, but she may have worked in a union in her younger years. She sure did like the idea of unions.     

          She was convinced that if she and I formed a union (what, phone sales drones local 221?) she could tell NBM to step off.

          I don’t know why she needed to be in a union to do that. She did that on a regular basis.

          When I didn’t respond to the idea of forming a two person labor union, I thought the matter was dead. I realized my mistake one day when I opened the phone bill.

          See, one of my jobs is to open all the mail, decide which department it goes to, and if it’s a bill, which billing category it goes to. Then I stamp it and take it to the right desk. But you know, sometimes I take an interest in what I do…especially when it comes to the bills. Especially when the phone bill tops $3000 for a single month.

          I don’t know what kind of phone plan we had, but it make sense to have a big phone bill. We made a lot of phone calls. And when I say “we” we all know I mean “I” because Elsie, though she had NBM make her a worksheet with the numbers one through one hundred typed out on them, was unable to make more than a couple dozen business calls in the course of a day.

          Let me repeat that last thing:  she had the branch manager type out a chart of numbers one through one hundred so she could mark off a number each time she made a business call. I saw the sheets on her desk. The only thing she put on those sheets were coffee stains.

          But the day the phone bill hit three grand, NBM had the first of one I’m thinking were many small strokes. “What the….”

I can’t repeat the rest of what he said…I told my Sunday School class they could read these stories.

          “Who made fifteen calls to the branch in California?”

          I gotta be honest here. NBM liked to burst out of his office and ask random questions of no one in particular. So the import of this question didn’t quite hit me until he asked me a second time.

          “WHO MADE FIFTEEN CALLS TO THE BRANCH IN CALIFORNIA?”

          My response should have cleared up my involvement in the scandal. “We have a branch in California?”

          “Actually,” he was always much calmer once he knew he had an audience, “There are several Stuff, Installed branches in California, and it looks like someone made calls to all of them multiple times this past month.”

          He continued to study the phone bill. “And there are calls to branches all over the country, and a ton of calls to our branches in Memphis and Minneapolis.”

          (Our branch and two others were owned by one guy, BBO. I didn’t call them often. I didn’t need to unless I had to have someone cover our phones on the weekend.)

          “So when were the calls made?”  

          Now I knew the answer to this question. The calls, I would have bet my next paycheck, were made between five and eight in the evenings. The hours, if you’re keeping track, when Elsie worked alone.

          So, I guess she did know how to dial a phone. I honestly didn’t think she had the skills for that.

          “Oh I’m calling Minneapolis about this.”

          NBM was buddies with the branch manager in Minneapolis. It took him about seven minutes to find out what was going on.

          He burst out of his office again. “Is Elsie here yet?”

          “Is it 11:07?”

          He shook his head and glared at me. Oh, like I’m the one in the wrong since I just said out loud what everyone knew. Meanwhile, I could see PM, sitting at his desk, laughing at me.

          “When she gets here make sure she comes to my office.”

          Not a problem. I knew she’d cook a meal and then head to his office to yell about something. It’s what she did.

          Elsie arrived promptly at 11:07, parked her rolling cooler next to the microwave and started to unbag something that looked like half an elk from one of her purses.

          I wasn’t eager to smell microwaved elk. “NBM wants to see you.”

          “What, right now?”

          “I imagine. He told me to make sure you went to his office the minute you got here.” 

          She smiled and smoothed her misbuttoned blouse. “Well, I have been here six months as of last week. I’ll bet it’s my mid-year review.”

          I’ll bet it’s not.

          She presented herself in his office and he told her to close the door. PM and I were very disappointed. The good news is that if I stood in her office with my ear pressed to the wall, I could hear most of what they said.

          I didn’t need to do that. The shrieking started forty seconds after she closed the door. Two minutes later they called BBO at his home in Florida. They put him on speaker phone. It got to be a close call as to who was yelling louder:  Elsie or BBO.

          Turns out, Elsie had been spending her evenings for the past several weeks calling all the ISPs in the whole company, talking about how they all needed to form a union. She even dipped into some of the Canadian branches, although I guess she gave up when her eight words of French didn’t impress our neighbors to the north.

          Some of the ISPs had actually called BBO and informed him of her activities but it wasn’t until she harped on the two ISPs in his own happy family that he got serious. And it wasn’t until we had a $3000 phone bill that NBM even took notice. (BBO thought NBM was handling it. Boy was he wrong!)

          The speaker phone yelling kept up for a solid hour. The long and short of it was that Stuff, Installed was not a union company and was not going to ever be a union based company and if Elsie felt mistreated she could find employment elsewhere.

          Elsie did a lot of shrieking of her own. Her stance was that she WAS being mistreated because the whole company was a “good old boys network” and there was no way for a woman to be treated with any sense of respect or equality. She again demanded two paid twenty minute breaks and a longer lunch.

          A LONGER LUNCH?

          She was making more than $30,000 plus full benefits a year for working an easy job in a very nice office and doing a very, very bad job at it and she was complaining she was being mistreated? And she wanted a longer lunch?

          I, of course, was emailing a play by play to PM, although he could hear most of it through the Tunnel of Sound. It’s not that we were wasting time, it’s just that time seemed to stop for that hour. No one called, no one came in, we had little to do but stare at that door and listen to the battle waging inside.

          Elsie emerged, sweaty, but unbowed, and went to her desk to start her day. She apparently lost her appetite because the food she was going to prepare when she arrived stayed untouched, on the counter.

          For the next couple hours PM and I both stared at the stack of semi raw meat sitting on the counter…and the open container of cottage cheese also left behind in Elsie’s rush to “get her review done.”  We refused to do anything about it, and NBM seemed to ignore the dead animal flesh when he made his lunch-time pizza.

          In fact, when I returned from lunch it was STILL sitting there, only now the fruit flies had found it. Elsie, for the first time in the months I’d worked with her, was not eating a pre-lunch meal.

          I know you’re concerned for her health, but she was still able to take nourishment. She did have, after all, a two pound bag of pork rinds and enough soda to fill a bath tub. She sat there all day, staring at her screen, the picture of a perfect employee.

          Well, she didn’t actually make any phone calls…but I guess that meant she wasn’t trying to unite the women of Stuff, Installed to wage a gender war against management. So there’s that.